Silvana Marques was one of thousands of Brazilians who flocked to São Paulo’s most famous art museum one afternoon last week. But the 51-year-old teacher wasn’t there to marvel over fog-filled London landscapes at Masp’s new Monet retrospective. She had come to join a protest heaping scorn on Donald Trump.
Beneath the museum’s brutalist hulk, Marques spotted a cardboard effigy of the US president and took a picture with her phone before the Trump dummy was set on fire. “Laranjão safado,” which translates as big orange dirtbag, she wrote under her photo on Instagram. Nearby, demonstrators hoisted a red banner into the air which read: “Nice try Trump. But we’re not afraid.”
The rally was a response to Trump’s decision last week to launch a politically motivated trade war against South America’s biggest economy in an attempt to help his rightwing ally, the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, avoid jail.
Bolsonaro could face up to 43 years in prison if found guilty of masterminding a botched coup attempt after losing the 2022 presidential election. He is expected to be convicted and sentenced by the supreme court in the coming weeks.
On 9 July, Trump wrote to Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to demand that the charges against Bolsonaro be dropped and announce he would impose 50% tariffs on Brazilian imports until they were. “[This] is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!” thundered Trump, long Bolsonaro’s most important international backer.
The US president apparently expected his intervention to improve the outlook for Bolsonaro, 70, who is already banned from running in next year’s election. Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio, urged Lula’s administration to immediately cave in to Trump’s ultimatum by offering his father an amnesty from prosecution. Flávio Bolsonaro likened Brazil’s predicament to Japan’s at the end of the second world war when the US’s B-29 bombers blasted it into submission. “It’s up to us to show the responsibility to avoid two atomic bombs landing on Brazil,” he said.
But a week after Trump’s tariff announcement, the ploy seems to be backfiring badly. The move has reinvigorated Bolsonaro’s leftwing rivals, given Lula a bounce in the polls and prompted a wave of public anger, largely focused on the Bolsonaro clan who have spent years portraying themselves as flag-loving nationalists.
“Jair Bolsonaro couldn’t care less about Brazil. He’s a phoney patriot,” the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper fumed on Tuesday, excoriating the ex-president’s apparent willingness to throw his country to the wolves if it meant saving his own skin.
The newspaper’s editorial board instructed conservatives to pick their side: “Brazil’s or Bolsonaro’s. The two paths are diametrically opposed.”
Eliane Cantanhêde, a columnist for the Estado de São Paulo, saw three motives behind Trump’s “indecent proposal”. He hoped to boost far-right fellow travellers in South America; retaliate against Chinese involvement in the region after the recent Brics summit in Rio; and do a personal favour to Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, who has spent recent months lobbying officials in Washington after going into self-imposed exile in the US.
But Cantanhêde believed Trump’s “megalomaniac” move had boomeranged, handing Lula a golden opportunity to recover slumping public support by posing as a nationalist defender of Brazilian coffee producers, orange growers, cattle ranchers and plane manufacturers in the face of Bolsonaro’s anti-patriotic and self-serving sellout to Trump.
“Lula was on the ropes,” Cantanhêde said, highlighting the leftist’s falling ratings and growing doubts over his ability to win a fourth term next year. “Now he’s all smiles.”
She said Beijing – Brazil’s biggest trade partner – would also be celebrating as Washington further damaged its standing in the region. “Trump is pushing the whole world into China’s lap,” Cantanhêde said.
Nicolás Saldías, a Latin America analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, agreed Trump’s pro-Bolsonaro intercession was a boon for Lula, who has taken to wearing a blue cap bearing the slogan “Brazil belongs to the Brazilians”.
Saldías, who is Uruguayan-Canadian, recalled how Trump’s threats to annex Canada upended its recent election, helping Mark Carney’s once flagging Liberal party keep power. He suspected Trump’s trade war on Brazil would have a similar “rally around the flag” impact for Lula – in the short-term, at least.
“For Lula this is going to be helpful,” Saldías said, noting how his ratings had already risen and looked likely to rise further. “This changes the game because now he’s going to be seen as the defender of Brazilian nationalism, a kind of progressive nationalism.”
Having spent months dreaming that Trump may help save their leader from prison, the Bolsonaros appear to recognise they have scored an own goal. One source close to the ex-president’s family told Reuters: “The thrill of catching Trump’s attention soon curdled as the Bolsonaros realised the crushing weight of the tariffs tied to their cause.”
On Tuesday, Bolsonaro insisted he opposed the tariffs, which he blamed on Lula’s “provocation” of the US, and claimed he could fix at least part of the problem if given “the freedom to talk to Trump”.
Silvana Marques, the protesting teacher, was adamant the Brazilian authorities should not yield to “crazy” Trump’s demands and let Bolsonaro off the hook. “We cannot allow this to happen,” she said, remembering the dire consequences of failing to prosecute the military leaders behind Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship.
Like many Brazilians, Marques took a dim view of how – as she saw it – the Bolsonaros had encouraged Trump to wage economic war against their own country.
“They’re a family of traitors,” she said. “And the Americans must be thinking: are we really going to have to pay 50% more for the things we import from Brazil just to defend this worn-out old horse?”
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